(Yicai Global) April 26 -- The winners of the first Cultural and Innovative Shanghai awards, co-organized by Shanghai DoBe Cultural & Creative Industry Development Group, a developer and operator of cultural and creative industry clusters, will be announced shortly at a presentations ceremony.

More than 400 companies signed up to the contest. Fifty-one qualified for the selection round held at the DoBe WE International Hub Century Space between April 10 and 13. A jury of 20 experts from well-known venture capital firms will select the recipients of the 35 awards.

The contest, themed Cultural and Innovative Shanghai Gathering Forces for the Future, has three competition areas: digital tech and metaverse, future lifestyle, and original content production and distribution.

The awards build a platform for contestants to show themselves, provides them with specific business path suggestions, and partners with top-notch business schools to help cultural and innovative companies to get funding, resources, ideas, and entrepreneurship help, DoBe's Chairman Jia Bo said.

Some of the startups taking part in the contest were invited to join a work camp on April 19, with entrepreneurs sharing their experiences and helping the new ventures find solutions to difficulties, thereby making them more competitive.

The work camp dealt with the barriers startups face to build technical and application scenarios, business models, operations, and so forth by bringing in industry experts, investment professionals, and experienced business managers, Jia noted.

Shanghai-based DoBe assists startups in the cultural and scientific innovation fields. It has signed deals with dozens of cultural innovation industrial parks in more than 10 cities worldwide, including Nanjing, Changsha, Silicon Valley, and Florence, and attracted firms in the cultural and scientific innovation areas to cluster.

DoBe also organizes the International Community Festival and ICF Innovation Connection Fair. It went public on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2021.

Editors: Zhang Yushuo, Futura Costaglione